Wednesday, January 4, 2017

ProEXR is Free

About 10 years ago I released ProEXR, a set of After Effects and Photoshop plug-ins for using multi-channel OpenEXR files. From the beginning, the core AE plug-ins were free and the source code was available. A year later the AE plug-ins started shipping with After Effects CS4, and they still do to this day. Eventually ProEXR AE was added, ProEXR EZ was made free, then Premiere plug-ins were added and later included with the program, free. I guess the only thing left to do is make the whole darn thing free. And so it is. (It's open source too.)

From the bottom of my heart, I would like to thank everyone who bought ProEXR over the years. Your support has really meant a lot, and allowed me to keep refining ProEXR into a stable product used by artists and installed in studios all over the world. All those who will use ProEXR in the future owe you a debt.

To be candid, part of the decision to make ProEXR free was driven by the emergence of another free Photoshop plug-in with a strikingly similar feature set. It looks nice, check it out.

Thanks Brendan, yours is still superior for us as it's for Mac too and it does unpremuliplication correctly. The main thing that the 'other' software does better for us is the dataWindow which I know you exposed as a scriptable solution with proEXR but it would have been great if it used it automatically? Not that I'm sure you'll be motivated to take feature requests now. I've looked at the source and it's fairly monsterous, and I thought the Photoshop scriptin API was bad enough!

xmnr0x23, not sure if you know this but in ProEXR 1.9.2 I quietly added the ability to pass the EXR metadata through to the save. For a long time the plug-in has read the metadata into File Info, now it writes it back out from there as well.

Hey David, handling displayWindow more directly sounds like a good feature request. I'd want to make it an option (possibly the default) for those times when people need access to all the dataWindow pixels. Just because ProEXR is now free doesn't mean it's dead. I'll just have to find time to work on it.